Eminent Indian professor honored by Sorbonne

[Guest guest]

My belief is once Classical Tamil studies, Dravidian linguistics

get full Professorships at universities like Sorbonne, Yale,

lot of problems pertaining to ancient India will get resolved.

Including the language shift that happened in India to IA in

post-IVC times.

 

Agree with LS that these honors are long overdue for Thapar.

Aren't R. Champakalakshmi (of Sulamnagalam) and Sanjay

Subrahmaniam students/coleages of Prof RT?

 

Regards,

N. Ganesan

 

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indictraditions, "Yvette C. Rosser" <y.r.rani@m...> wrote:

Immediately below is a paragraph excerpted from the welcome address

for Professor Romila Thapar at French National Institute of Oriental

Studies in Paris, on the 19th

April 2001:

 

"In this context, we have felt the pangs of shame upon

seeing the writings of one of our countrymen settled in India, a

self-styled historian who thought it, and himself, fit to rewrite

Indian history, seeking to bring into disrepute the historical

production of authors of the stature of Professor Thapar. The

confering of this Honorary Doctorate is also for us the occasion to

set the balance right and to discharge our duty toward's our Indian

colleagues."

 

WHO IS THIS FRENCHMAN ''SETTLED INDIA" WHO IS A "SELF-STYLED

HISTORIAN. . .REWRITING INDIAN HISTORY"?

 

To whom is this statement referring?

 

Thanks,

Yvette

 

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Full text of:

Welcome address for Professor Romila Thapar at the Grand Amphitheatre

of the Sorbonne on the occasion of the award of the Doctor Honris

causa of the French National Institute of Oriental Studies (INALCO),

Paris, on the 19th April 2001

 

Mr. President, Honorable Ambassadors, dear Colleagues and Students,

 

On an occasion such as this, honour and recognition are reciprocal.

At the French National Institute of Oriental Studies, in conferring

this honour today upon Professor Romila Thapar, we feel equally

honoured to welcome to the ranks of our Docteurs honoris causa a

person of such intdlectual stature, a person who has consistently

embodied the richest current of Indian historical research

 

The award of this Doctorate can be said to be an important halt in a

long journey. With her keen interest in French historial research and

writing. Professor Thapar has travelled to France often, right from

her student days at the University of London, and later during her

many research trips westwards, as also in pursuance of her

responsibilities as Vice president of the UNESCO Commission on the

History of Humanity, and more resently thanks to her lectures at the

College de France at the invitation of Profesor Gerard Fussman.

 

As professor of Ancient Indian History at New Delhi's Jawaherlal Nehru

University since 1970 (where she spent much of her life teaching, and

where is she is now professor Emeritus), Professor Thapar has built

up an outstanding tradition of teaching history, a tradition that is

at once rigorous in its method and open to dialogue with a variety of

historiographical traditions. In Delhi, she developed a personal

rapport with a number of European professors on teaching assignments

there, notably with our colleague Professor France Bhattacharya, who

proposed her name to our institute, and thanks to whom we have

Professor Thapar in our midst.

 

Professor Thapar earlier devoted a substantial part of her time to the

study of the formation of the State in ancient India, focussing on the

processes of transition leading from lineage-based tribal societies

described in the ealiest texts towards the affirmation of

the monarchical principle, then to imperial ideal embodied in Asoka

Maurya, deeply marked by the ethics of Buddhism.

 

She was thus led to confont the specific problems of the writing of

ancient Indian history. The"orientalist" approach developed by most

European scholars of the colonial period, on the basis of the rarity

of historiacal texts amidst the abundant literary production of

ancient India, concluded that India " had no history" ( aview based

on conceptions of brahman informants), or that it was impossible to

reconstruct a history of India given the ansence of documentary

evidence (a rather condescending view held by positivist historians).

 

Professor Thapar brilliantly demonstrated the contrary, handling with

a rare talent and competence the archeological, epigraphic and

numismatic sources, and especially developing a method of critical

analysis of great epic textx, mythical narratives and genealogical

material.

 

Not only did she prove that it was possible today to write a history

of ancient India, but also that historcial consciousness was not

absent from the mental world of Indians in ancient Indian in ancient

times -- that a variety of attitudes had existed in relation to the

past, none of which enjoyed exclusive rights, and interaction amongst

which was the constitutive if Indian cultural identity.

 

Combining this innovative research on the history of mentalitics with

her more classical work on political and social history, Profesor

Thapar places herself in an intellectual tradition familiar to French

historians, influenced in some way or the other by the Annales school

founded by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre

 

But one of her greatest merits is never to have been drawn into the

dominant intellectual currents of the day, to have resisted the

relativism and the so called post-modernism cultivated by the

intellectual mileu on the American side of the Atlantic, to have

pursued in that exemplary fashion "the historian's craft" to use

Marc Bloch's expression, and her "enterprise of knowledge" as Amartya

Sen, the economics Nobel laureate and another of her illustrious

compatriots would have put it.

 

The historian's craft, but also the "historian's battle" to borrow

now an expression from Lucien Febvre. As far back as 1966, Profesor

Thapar gave to a wide English readership a Hictory of ancient lndia,

regularly reprinted since, which has become the reference work on the

subject, both in India and abroad The developments in research since

the time of its writing, and in thought of its writer, h ave led her

to prepare a completely revised edition of this book expected later

this year.

 

Many of us are keen that this work be translated and published in

French as soon as possible, so as to fill the gaping hole into which

the uninitiated French reader risks falling, into the arms of

mediocre, indeed questionable kinds of authors, who seem to made good

in in academic and intellectual context characterized, as Roger-Pol

Droit has pointed out, by the forgetting of lndia. In this context,

we have felt the pangs of shame upon seeing the writings of one of

our countrymen settled in India, a self-styled historian who thought

it, and himself, fit to rewrite Indian history, seeking to bring into

disrepute the historical production of authors of the stature of

Professor Thapar. The confering of this Honorary Doctorate is also

for us the occasion to set the balance right and to discharge our

duty toward's our Indian colleagues.

 

As for her battle far history Professor Thapar continues to wage it

in her own country, in the face of those, guided by fundamentalist

and univocal conceptions of Indian history, who are seeking to deny

history its stature and role in primary and secondary education and

dictating to the academic mileu an approach that obliterts the

cultural diversity and tolerance that are the essence of tbe spirit

of India.

 

As the times rernind us every day, no age or country is fee from the

scourge of obscurantism. In certain cirumstances the profession of

teaching and research can become a high-risk occupation. This ceremony

today is not in our eyes a routine ceremony. It is charged wth meaning

 

The great poet and dramatist of ancient India, Kalidasa, titled his

chef d 'ocuvre-it is a tale of forgetting and remembrance. --

Abhijana Shakuntalam. May theDoctarate that is about to be conferred

upon Professor Thapar be a sign of recognition and remembrance, a

mememto not only of her scientific merit and her intellectual talent,

but also of our solidarily by her side and the side of our

colleagues, teachers and scholars of all nations who are fighting to

defend a rigourous and critical conception of their craft.

 

Erec Meyer Professor of South Asian History

INALCO, Paris

 

 

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